“Chain Lightning”—third song, side two of Katy Lied (1975)

I always kind of ignored this one, since it's a blues guitar song with a lot of guitar—in my mind, I almost remembered it being an instrumental. The guitar is pleasant enough, somewhat restrained (as far as guitar playing goes)—it's just that, sometimes—guitar—all you can do is shake your head in resignation. Just a few years before I was born, very few people had guitars, and now, as you know, everyone has a guitar. Relatively inexpensive, portable, relatively easy to learn, and cool—I don't know whether to see the guitar thing as amazing or tragic—I guess both. Also, you can practice at a low volume, so there are just generations of hyperactive, OCD, and otherwise fucked up kids locked in their bedroom just “practicing” all night. And eventually, when everyone is a virtuoso, no one is. I read somewhere that Rick Derringer played on this song, and unfortunately I only remember him from that hit song (you know) he had, but I looked him up, and his real name is almost Derringer (Zehringer) (I'm not making that up), and he's from Ohio, one of those small towns I haven't been through, near Indiana, built on a foundation of genocide, revolution, and agriculture, I guess. Growing up practicing guitar, at least, has to be an improvement on being a virtuoso at killing.

The lyrics are obscure enough to be indecipherable, but there are enough clues to get pretty creeped out by it (“brotherhood,” “little man,” and stuff about looking the other way). Not to mention, chain lightning, which, if you're not referring to weather, usually represents some kind of killing. When I think about it, now, this song strikes me as kind of funny, because it's so laid back, jazzy, easy going—which echos the lyrics on the surface, but contrasts with the underlying feeling, which, even if you don't know what it's about, is undeniable. So, after listening to this song a few more times, and thinking about all this, I've gotten to like it much, much more (which is kind of the point of all this). One thing I realized is really attractive to me is the rhyme scheme, which I guess you'd say goes “AAAABB”—essentially a four line verse with all lines rhyming, and then a two line course with those two rhyming. It's probably pretty common, but I can't think of a song exactly like that, offhand. It's very simple, but also very effective. Pretty much the whole song, as a whole, you could say, presents itself as fairly minimal, simple, not much there—but if you step back and take it in, there's a lot going on. Kind of a great song, after all.

—Randy Russell 5.24.20